Windows Azure: New Operating System for Cloud Computing

The cloud computing space is now really heating up with competing platform plays from Google’s AppEngine and Amazon’s recent EC2 announcements.Microsoft has also joined the race.Ray Ozzie announced the New operating System for Cloude computing named WINDOWS AZURE in PDC 2008.

Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers.The major features it provids are Automated Service Management, Powerful Service hosting environment, Scalable , avilable cloude storage and a Rich familier developer experience.

So visit http://www.microsoft.com/azure/windowsazure.mspx. Download the SDK, register yourslf to try it out today .

To watch the PDC2008 Keynotes on Windows Azure visit http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/KYN01/

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Error in Application : ASP.NET application not able to access a file from a shared folder.

Problem: I am running an ASP.NET 2.0 application in IIS 6.0 which is trying to access a file available in a shared folder. All though the fie is available in the folder file.IsExist () method returns false. But same method works fine when trying to access another file available in a shared folder in a different Machine. The major difference between these two machines that I found initially is, first machine is running in a VMware environment. When trying to access the same file from a client side code it works fine for both the servers.

Solution: This problem was due to date time difference between the file server where file exists and the web server where the web application is running. It is working fine when accessing the file from client side code because it uses NT LAN Manager (NTLM) where as when accessing the file from server side code it uses Kerberos. The Kerberos client on the local computer encrypts a timestamp inside the authenticator and then sends it to the Key Distribution Center (KDC). If the KDC verifies that the time it decrypts from the authenticator is within a specified amount of the local time on the KDC (the default is five minutes), the system can assume that the credentials presented are genuine. SO if you synchronize the clock between two servers it will work.

There is another solution to this problem. You can change the value of the Maximum tolerance for computer clock synchronization setting to a higher value. Use the steps mentioned in the following URL to configure this setting.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc780011.aspx

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DevLabs: Microsofts new initiative to bring software innovations for the developer community

Microsoft has release a new sites named DEVLab for reaching out to broad developer audiences with new, developer-focused technologies well before they are officially released. The labs are structured to help the developer community to evaluate these new technologies and discuss them through the microsoft forums with the developer community and Microsoft product groups. Currently there are only 4 projects added to this Lab, Microsoft Popfly,Small Basic,Pex – Automated White Box Testing for .NET and CHESS – Finding and Reproducing Heisenbugs in Concurrent Programs.

To participate in this initiative visit the following URL.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/devlabs

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